The volumetric representation of data appears to have been drawn from the expertise of the Centre for Medical Image Science at Linköpings university . The interaction/installation/industrial design concept and production appears to be drawn from the expertise of the SII. These two elements of the project come together under the banner of the intriguing Visualisation Centre in Norrköping which includes presentations on Swedish innovation in visualisation, educational workshops, a cinema, and a dome projection system as well as providing an umbrella (in terms of funding and research) for visualisation projects. The Centre is closely associated with the  Visualisation Information Technology and Applications centre at inköpings university who is also involved in the development of the project.

Bystander is a multichannel interactive video, sound and interactive installation by Australian artists Kate Richards and Ross Gibson. Bystander is one of the Life After Wartime suite which includes works; Crime Scene, LAW Live, Darkness Loiters, and the LAW CD-ROM. Bystander is the final work of the suite all of which is based on an unsorted and poorly documented archive of post-war crime scene and police photographs. Richards and Gibson have used these evocative images as the basis for a fictional narrative . That narrative  unfolds according to the participants movement within the installation space and their interaction. A ‘kinaesthetic particle animation’ responds, reflects and feeds back on the relation between body and archive. The development of the narrative is keyed to the quality of movements of bodies in the space. A still and attentive participant unlocks a deeper and more focussed narrative unfolding while the hyperactive participant realise a more fragmented and playful experience.

The work establishes a complex play between a societal perception and response to a diffuse, arbitrary, and perhaps ambient criminality and violence and the more complex and highly contextual set of relations that have produced such an archive. In the process Bystander posits intriguing questions about the nature of the archive, narrative, technology (perhaps including the former two but extending to the institution, interaction, photography), and affect.

The Korsakow non-linear video system has been central to the groups work – Originally designed by New Media artist Florian Thalhofer – the system was further developed in conjunction with CINER-G. Matt Soar is the principle investigator on this project is a major contributor to a growing community of users.

A story from the Concordia University Joural regarding the work of the Research Group, its relation to the Korsokow project, and its use in teaching non-linear video can be found here.

He is the founder of Transmute, the interdisciplinary collective behind Intimate Transactions, an interactive installation that has been exhibited all over the world, where two people in geographically separate spaces inhabit and interact in a shared virtual space.

She has performed audio/visual work with artists like Chris Caines, Shannon O’Neill and Ben Byrne. She has curated collaborative performance events like Semaphore and is also Co-Director of the Firstdraft Gallery.

In many of her pieces a live physical presence central to the work, where the audience’s movement and interaction with the installation directly affects the space. In Potential Energy, where a line of sensors on the wall set into movement the line of chains opposite, the audience functions as triggers. In The Real Thing, a large-scale kaleidoscope where the viewer’s body not only triggers the installation but becomes the content for it, the work literally cannot function without the presence of an audience, as it is their body that is captured as an image, processed and projected as the kaleidoscopic content shifts and changes with the person’s movement.

She has collaborated with performers, writers, video artists and sound artists like Talia Linz, Eva Mueller, Young-Ah Noh, Matthias Erian, Muse Me and Nick Mariette, and participated in residencies ranging from CarriageWorks in Sydney to the Transmediale: Digital Culture Festival in Berlin.

As the user goes about their day, the bio sensors capture real-time information on their physical states, including pulse, movement, skin temperature and galvanic skin response. At the end of the day, when the user syncs the collection devices to the tablet, the software interprets the bio data and represents the user’s emotional and physical states as colourful body shapes in positions ranging from fully reclined to upright. The colour of the shapes represent emotional states, with blue for the calm/rested end of the scale, red for the other aroused/agitated extreme, and gradations of purple for the states in between. Whether the shapes are more horizontal or vertical indicates that the user is moving around a lot or a little, respectively. Text messages that the user has received throughout the day, and photos they have taken are also uploaded to the diary from their mobile phone. All this bio and social data is then overlaid on a timeline of the user’s day.

The user can then navigate their diary by scrolling through this timeline and looking at sections of their day and the data associated with it. Photos they have taken are displayed in stacks according to their timestamp, and circular symbols that represent text messages received can be clicked on to reveal their contents. The user also has the ability to write or draw on these sections – perhaps notes on where they were, who they were talking to – adding another layer of narrative.

High-res screen captures can be viewed here and there is a video with more information on how to use the system here.

Affective Diary was developed in the Interaction Lab at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) in cooperation with Microsoft Research. Participants in the project are: Kristina Höök, Martin Svensson, Anna Ståhl, Petra Sundström and Jarmo Laaksolathi, SICS, Marco Combetto, Alex Taylor and Richard Harper.

Based in the UK, Haque Design + Research is a centre specializing in the design and research of interactive architecture systems. Headed by Usman Haque, the centre houses the collaborative projects of a collective of designers and architects including Ali Hasegawa, Barbara Jasinowicz, Chris Leung and Susan Haque. The team’s innovation is based on the assumption that architecture is no longer to be considered something static and immutable; it is instead imagined as dynamic, responsive and conversant.

As an architect, Husman Haque’s stated focus has been to consider what he’s called the ‘software’ of space (ie. sounds, smell, light, temperature, electromagnetic fields, social relationships etc) as opposed to the ‘hardware’ (ie. floors, walls, roof etc) – the domain of traditional architecture. His personal work has involved the creation of responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass participation performances, all of which have displayed a celebrated skill for the design of physical space and the software and systems that may bring them to life. His work has been recognized and supported via several prestigious international grants and residencies.

Projects completed by Haque Design + Research transverse the aesthetic and the social. Examples include ‘Reconfigurable House’, an environment constructed from thousands of low-tech components that can be “reconfigured” by its occupants, allowing them to determine the systems that run inside it; and ‘Haunt’, a collaboration in non-visual architecture that uses humidity, temperatures and electromagnetic and sonic frequencies to imbue an environment with a simulated feeling of ‘haunted-ness’.

Pachube is currently a main focus for Haque Design + Research.

Courchesne earned a BA in Communication Design from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974) and a MA of Science in Visual Studies from MIT (1984). In the early 1980s he helped pioneer the field of interactive video when he co-authored Elastic Movies (1984) with Ellen Sebring, Benjamin Bergery, Bill Seaman et al. Throughout recent decades he has continued to produce several interactive installations that combine light, photography, design, sound, film and video.

Courshesne’s installations characteristically encourage participants to enter into an immersion of images and sounds that is triggered and guided by use of their own voice and physical movement; the works attempt to remove all spatial reference to plunge the viewer into an interactive, virtual world within which they are able to transverse landscapes and communicate with real or fictional people. Courchesne’s ongoing interest in socialisation has grown more pronounced from each work to the next as his installations have themselves become more increasingly complex and advanced in their development and presentation mode. In Where Are You? (2005) visitors are invited to operate a joystick to control their flight through a world of several dimensions that are defined by an X,Y and Z scale – the higher the visitor travels to the ‘+’ end of each axis, the more detailed the world they experience is. Here existence is paramount, for the work is dependent upon the visitor’s whims and choices to define itself and reach its full potential.

Courchesne is based in Montreal where he is professor of information design at Université de Montréal. Courchesne is also a founding member of the Society for Arts and Technology.

NRPA was founded in 1981 with the purpose of supporting and developing radio art, a cultural movement encompassing experimental sound-based practices conceived to operate within the specific parameters associated with broadcast radio. The organization was considered to lie at the international forefront of radio art distribution between 1987 and 1998, during which over 300 works for public radio were commissioned and disseminated via the weekly program series New American Radio.

Taking heed of significant cultural shifts resulting from the expansion and proliferation of wireless and digital modes of communication, the NRPA extended its mandate in 1996 to support the then burgeoning practice of net art by launching Turbulence. The project and its associated website currently remains dedicated to commissioning and exhibiting the work of artists who either use existing applications and technologies or develop new ones to create innovative, hybrid or networked art forms that use the Internet as a primary medium. The organisation’s key channels for facilitating the creation and reception of new works are its Artists’ Studios, Guest Curator, Spotlight and Events programs. Importantly, the Turbulence website houses an online archive of over 160 projects commissioned by the body throughout its 13 year life.

Other NRPA supported projects affiliated with Turbulence include the Networked_Performance research blog (2004 -), a valuable resource that chronicles the wide range of issues and perspectives linked with various network-enabled practices, and the Networked_Music_Review blog (2007 -), which accommodates the present legacy of New American Radio by gathering data on projects, performances, composers, musicians and software tools related with emerging networked musical explorations made possible by computers, the Internet and mobile technologies.

An artist-led group that utilizes networked media to create, explore, nurture and promote the art that happens when connections are made and knowledge is shared – across the boundaries of established art-world institutions and their markets, grass-roots artistic and activist projects and communities of socially-engaged software developers. This is a spectrum that engages from the maverick media-art-makers and small collectives of cross-specialist practitioners, to projects that critique and change dominant hierarchical structures as part of their art process.

Furtherfield

Since the start in 1998, their work has been characterized by not only conducting traditional academic research but also exploring the borders between art, design and technology, industry and academy, etc. The institute has about 60 employees organized in a number of research studios/groups located in Kista/Stockholm, Piteå, Eskilstuna, Norrköping, Växjö and Göteborg. Each research group has its own focus area that relates to the overall focus of combining technology with art and design.

The Interactive Institute has a number of research groups within it such as Digital Cultural Heritage Centre which looks at issues such as cultural knowledge transfer in new media and technologies, The Design Research Centre which seems concerned with developing big-picture research strategies, Sound Studio and SoundSpace groups working in interactive sound design, NVISION working with visualisation techniques and Mobility Studio which looks at, well, developments in the use of mobile technologies.

The Mobile Life Centre at Stockholm University has a research focus that spans from social and entertainment and work aspects of mobile technologies, affective engagement and ubiquitous computing. Set up as a 10 year funding project by VINNOVA – (The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems), which is a State authority that aims to ‘promote growth and prosperity throughout Sweden’ through funding ‘innovations linked to research and development’. The Centre names the Interactive Insitute and the Swedish Insitute of Computer Science as collaborative partners, and also list a number of industry partners including Sony Ericsson, Microsoft Research and Stockholm Innovation and Growth. The centre lists around 20 PhD students and Professorial staff on its list of researchers and lsome of the more interesting research projects include:

Mobile Eco-System

The future mobile eco-system – who pays for what? And what does it feel like? A future mobile service eco-system where we explore alternative universes for infrastructure, business models and the industry’s new role.

Embodied Affective Interaction

Interact emotionally with your whole body. New mobile and ubiquitous services in areas such as pervasive games, social, emotional and bodily communication and new mobile media.

There is also an interesting list of seminars on topics such as the following:
Beyond representations: Towards an action-centric perspective on tangible interaction

Mobile Collaborative Live Video Mixing

Affective Loops : research agenda for bodily persuasion through a design approach we name affective loops is outlined. Affective loop experiences draw upon physical, emotional interactions between user and system.

Whilst this begins to appear quite the complex web of tangled connections, it seems that one common link and hence potentially a good interview subject might be Professor Kristina Hook . She is Professor at Mobile Life, as well as Lab Manager at Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and Professor of Human-Machine Interaction at the Dept of Computer and Systems Science (a joint venture between Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology, Kristina Hook lists research projects in embodied interaction and ‘affective computing’ among her interests. Particularly notable is the research project which has involved Microsoft Research called Affective Diary, which investigates techniques data-mapping diary of galvanic skin response via mobile technologies, and seems to have spawned collaborative projects such as a sound design project which looks at sonification techniques using the data sets generated by Affective Diary.

Youtube video on Affective Diary with Kristina Hook

With a background in interaction design, focused on algorithm controlled animation, sensor driven interactive installations, web applications, broadcast applications and digital design, shiftcontrol applies a united process of design and development to its clients and users.
In 2008 Simon Løvind joined as associate partner, bringing experience from media-art, academia and game developement.

shiftcontrol has already taken on projects for Carlsberg, ZDF, Al Aan, BBC, Danish TV2, PRADA, OMA, AMO, Kontrapunkt and VW.

shiftcontrol works tightly with the team behind Unity – our preferred platform for exploring next generation interactive media, and Markus Schaefer/Hosoya Schaefer Architects – our preferred partner for exploring next generation concepts.

Salter studied economics and philosophy at Emory University and completed a Ph.D. in theater+computer-generated sound at Stanford University in 1997.He was awarded the Fulbright and Alexander von Humboldt “Bundeskanzler” grants for research/work in Germany between 1993-1995 where he collaborated with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe at the Ballett Frankfurt( Eidos:Telos, 1995, Sleepers Guts, 1997).

In 1997, he co-founded the art+research organization Sponge, an interdisciplinary association of artists and researchers who are exploring the nexus of investigative art, speculative design and techno-scientific research. His work with Sponge has toured internationally to festivals and exhibitions such as Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH 2000, Mediaterra-Athens, the Exploratorium, Mediaterra-Athens, the Exploratorium, Banff Center and V2 Rotterdam and has received recent grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the LEF Foundation.